GO ASK ELLIS

Action artist David Ellis aka SKWERM

… who, among other things, is the founder of the Barnstormers
as featured in the December 2009 issue of Juxtapoz …
was layering down the paint in Austin recently,
as the first international artist invited to create work
for the new Visual Arts Center at the University of Texas.

I interviewed Ellis for a short piece in the Chronicle.
It was a sort of hey-check-this-out press shout about his residency,
so's to stir up (or satisfy) some general interest about
the man's work and what the Center promises
for the future of UT-sponsored art.

Since Ellis's big thing (aside from the painting itself)
is videodocumentation of what he does,
YouTube was a great source for research,
for seeing what his paintings look like
as they morph from one image to the next.
And how the man collaborates with other artists,
as seen in this mindblowing collaboration with Italy's BLU.

I'm pointing this out to you not just because
you'll enjoy watching those videos (which you probably will)
or because the Chron article is especially well-written
~ it's merely adequate ~
but because I want you to be aware, if you're not already,
of the vivid graphics that Ellis creates and the
~ dare I say it? ~ oh sweet jesus, I'mma say it ~
the paradigm-shifting way he videographically captures
and intarwebbishly distributes his acts of creation.

And I want you to be aware of this because
this year's printed edition of Minerva's Wreck will be released soon.

Which means I'll be free to begin work
on next year's edition, on Minerva's Wreck: 2011.

And, among the other wonders to be found in its pages,
each instance of Minerva's Wreck: 2011 will include
an original painting by David Ellis.

Whoa, you may say.
W, you may wonder, TF?

This: I was in the Visual Arts Center, pre-interview, waiting for Ellis.
I was talking to Nicole Vlado, the internal affairs coordinator
of UT's "Landmarks" public art program.

As Vlado described the program and its planned future,
I was looking around the enormous front studio
that held the structure that Ellis & his crew had built
to house and light the painting surfaces for best video recording.
Sitting to one side of this working structure was a canvas:
A big canvas … an enormous fucking canvas … a canvas
that was so large that it had been folded into itself many times
& was still larger than the back seat of my car.

The part of the canvas that was visible was covered with familiar colors and lines. I knew, because it was obviously one of Ellis's worksurfaces, that the bright latex marking the giant canvas must be in, what, ten, fifteen layers?

The giant folded canvas was sitting atop
a scattering of rags and wires and sawdust.

I asked Vlado, "Uh, what's ... that?"

"That's a used canvas," she said.
"David's going to take it out to the Dumpster later."

"The Dumpster? He's just going to ... throw it away?"

"Yeah," said Vlado, "he ~"

"I could do that for him," I said.
"I mean, I could take it, if that's okay. If he wouldn't mind?"

"Well," said Vlado, "you can certainly ask him ..."

And so I did. After the interview wound down ~ Ellis had to get back to painting, I had to get back to the office, the afternoon was grinding on through an overcast, grackle-bothered sky ~ I pointed to the folded canvas. Told Ellis that I'd be glad to take care of it for him. Told him that I did an annual anthology to which pieces of the canvas, accompanying an article about its creator and the cultural ramifications of his work, would be a perfect addition.

"Sure," he said, shrugging. "Yeah, that's cool."

The folded canvas was just slightly larger than the back seat of my car; a bit more folding & its bulk was accommodated.

The mass of paint-thickened fabric is in my apartment now,
taking up about one-sixth of my small bedroom.

And so: For the oversized Minerva's Wreck: 2011, which will be released in an edition of 250 in the summer of that year, Ellis's canvas will be cut into pieces approximately 10 x 12 inches each and ~ enclosed in a heavy-gauge clear plastic bag ~ affixed to the inside back cover of the anthology ... to illuminate an article ~ a combination of fact-based reportage and critical essay ~ by design journalist William Bostwick.

Yeah, we're pretty excited about this.

The Meatspace Manifestation

The first offline form of Minerva's Wreck was released in 2009, 
in an oversized, handworked edition of 300.

The most thorough response to the project
was from Alan Rankin, writing in Poopsheet:

“This is the artifact itself.”

These words are on the indicia page of Minerva's Wreck. They remind me of Magritte's painting of a pipe, labeled “This is not a pipe.” Minerva's Wreck, no mere reproduction, is an art object itself, rare and beautiful, and perfectly aware of its status as such.

I can't write an ordinary review for this celebration of all things Austin and arty. Minerva's Wreck deserves something special. To give it the standard Ebertian thumbs-up would be like describing the canelones caseros at Austin's Buenos Aires Cafe as merely “delicious.” No words can adequately describe it to the uninitiated; and for those who already know, no explanation is necessary.

I liked Minerva's Wreck so much, I picked up and moved to Austin. Yeah, that's closer to the mark. An exaggeration, of course - or is it? Read the long personal narrative by editor Wayne Alan Brenner that threads its way through the pages of Minerva like a needle through fine cloth. Brenner's essay is all about the subtle, synchronous ways the city entwines itself into one's life; how the people and places at the hippie heart of Texas can create an Austin epiphany. Having experienced my own such epiphany, I cannot write about the city or its artists with objectivity - and it wouldn't really be appropriate to do so. Like the Beat, or the blues: you just gotta live it.

Minerva's Wreck is a very limited edition. Its rareness means most Poopsheet readers will never see it. This provides a special challenge to the reviewer. Ordinarily, the message of a review comes down to some version of “Buy the damned thing.” (Or: “Don't.”) But in a case like this, I have to sum the experience; the reader's vicarious pleasure depends on how well I express my own. Fortunately, I have lots of experience describing those wild paths and arcane alleys that most readers will never visit.

Good art makes you feel things: anger, hope, loss, love. Great art makes you feel things that cannot be summed in single words. Sometimes a photograph or a painting can fill you with a complex longing, like nostalgia for a place that never existed. When we say art enriches life, this is the full meaning of the word. Examples:

· Molly Rice's memoir of youth and illness, “Seizureville,” is listed under “Fiction.” But it is so painful it must be real, a sore spot in your mouth you can't stop touching with your tongue. It reproduces a tiny slice of life to perfection - like intricate dollhouse furniture - then rips it apart with one cataclysmic, drug-triggered grand mal.

· Profiles of the Alamo Drafthouse and The Order of the Oosik offer insights into gatherings of the Select. Somewhere there is a Church that never passes the plate, whose members pay for the privilege of congregating - but not with money. Their roving Witnessses walk right by you, their eyes passing over without interest - they're not looking for you. You must first approach them.

· Robert Faires' comic “The Lad in the Iron Mask” pastes a four-color hero into a little boy's life, just as that boy once imitated his heroes on the playground. If pop culture has invaded our lives to the extent that it supplants genuine experience, the story argues, then pop culture becomes genuine experience.

· Henri Mazza's “Kangaroos and Vibrators” successfully mingles loneliness with sheer banana silliness, like a 12-hour Animaniacs marathon and no one to watch it with.

· Brenner's rambling personal essay is the rooted bulb from which the rest of the magazine flowers. He's too wordy by half, but you can't stop reading, even flipping back to peruse footnotes that parody themselves. He's the friend whose chaotic personal life you've witnessed with alternating love and horror for the last 20 years.

The mag is full of goofy bonus materials - zines, stickers, postcards. The fact that some articles are illustrated with glossy color photos added by hand to each copy affirms Minerva's existence as an objet d'art. Other add-ons simply qualify as art. For example, why is Benjamin Reed's story of slow apocalypse, “Speechless,” obscured by multiple Post-it Notes portraying an open mouth? Well, Junior, that's what makes it art: Sometimes the question is the answer.

Brenner's mission in assembling the Wreck was clearly to collect some of the great art and writing generated in his home city on a regular basis. The fact that so many of the contributors are or were connected to him - even family - is neither accident nor design. It's just another example of what happens when you have a gathering of creative people, those for whom art is a way of life, not something you do in the off-hours. In a place like that, art and life intertwine so beautifully, so naturally, it's hard to believe we were intended to live any other way.

~ Alan Rankin

How Minerva Got Her Wreck

Whole lot of everything going on, Best Beloved.

More than ~ what is it, now? Some number we can't hold a significant portion of in our mind's arena? Six billion, the almanacs suggest. More than six billion of us, then: Cleaving the air around this whirling ball of mud, and many of us making things.

From Sheboygan to Shanghai, from Malmö to Mombasa, from Laos to Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, from ~ well, you get the idea: So many of us, everywhere, and so many of us creating. Or, at least, copying and modifying others' creations, thus commenting on current events and whatever's fueling the zeitgeist; or commenting on what we've just modified; or commenting on our own personal lives; or commenting on the act of creating; or commenting on commenting, sometimes, for fuck's sake.

And sometimes there's no copying or modifying involved at all.
Sometimes it's just commenting.
A lot of the time it's just commenting: Everybody's a critic.

The amount of creating and commenting had been increasing, of course, and its churn-rate accelerating, long before what we worked went digital. Before Tim Berners-Lee set the www to dancing a voodoo hipshake boogie via hypertext transfer protocol, thwarting time and space and joining our globally scattered selves in ways that can still boggle those not born alongside a world built on nothing but nothing and one.

But now? These days, with the weather on the change and the metaverse morphing all territorial in our meatspace wake?

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

We are already in a culture in which the cultural logic of information has shattered any comforting notion of order.
Non-linear principles of form, in fact, are the signifier of a culture accustomed to fragmentation and montage. Information
in this environment comes as an array rather than a sequence.

~ Timothy Druckrey, Information, Interactivity, Neurotechnology

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Still, barely daunted, we do our damnedest to consider and describe all that we've known in the past, to encompass both the particulars of what we're dealing with now and what, possibly, is left to come in the years before we nuclearly or biologically ragnarok ourselves to mythic smithereens. Some of us, reaching beyond omphaloskepsis, seem drawn to arrange the complex flora of le tout de monde into a single, coherent bouquet ~ nightshade, tansy, triffids and all ~ as if its subsequent presentation would win us the heart of whoever's heart is worth yearning for ... or reward us our own relief. It becomes apparent, though, that to try to singlehandedly wrangle the whole megillah is to court an obsession indistinguishable from madness.

A guy could go all Lovecraftian.
A guy could hallucinate Illuminati among the aspidistras.
A guy could pull a Johnny Truant and start nailing tape measures to the walls.
Jorge Borges, pudding and pi ~ y'know what I'm sayin'?

So what I'm doing here, with this unwieldy device yclept Minerva's Wreck? I'm considering and describing just a few scattered parts of the totality: The parts that come into contact with me, via whatever agency, and which I have the time and desire to go on about. It's a sort of value-added waggle dance (as famously performed by our hymenopteran friends, apis melliflera) potentially leading to your greater edification and entertainment. And ~ inasmuch as one can better understand one's own internal territories by mapping them textually ~ leading to a little edification for me, too.

Your comments, especially, will help with that last part.

Please: Don't hesitate.